Mr. Phoenix Turns Tumbledown Into Taj - Rennovating Historic Homes
I know Bobby and Adam would love this ... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/20/garden/2...nted=print&position=
Mr. Phoenix Turns Tumbledown Into Taj
By MITCHELL OWENS
November 20, 2003
THE PLAINS, Va. THE three-story house here owned by Christopher Ohrstrom appears pretty much as it might have in the 1830's, all pearl-white clapboard and window glass so wavy it always looks as if it's raining outside. Nearby stands a barn that dates from before the Civil War. And clustered around the two buildings are several modest white structures, including a privy where one of Robert E. Lee's sons is said to have hidden from Union soldiers.
From the looks of things, it's just another of the prosperous farms on the outskirts of this town of 266 people, within an hour's drive of Washington. The Plains is deep in manicured horse country out of a Constable painting, a place where old-money millionaires like Bunny Mellon cultivate anonymity.
But think again. Here at Lee Hall, where Mr. Ohrstrom, 47, an expert on early American decorative arts, lives with his wife, Lilla, 38, a sculptor, and their four children, everything old has been built again.
Since 1996, when they moved from upstate New York to this town, where both grew up, the Ohrstroms have been living a home-improvement project that puts "This Old House" to shame. Seven buildings on the 160-acre farm are Southern ruins dismantled like jigsaw puzzles and brought to the site by Mr. Ohrstrom and a team of craftsmen. Each building has been reconstructed and restored, one hand-forged nail at a time, to become part of the Ohrstrom family compound.
Up next is a condemned 1840's squab house, or pigeon coop, from a plantation in Hanover County, Va. (A curator at Colonial Williamsburg, part of what Mr. Ohrstrom jokingly called an information food chain "that knows which brand of heroin you like," alerted him to its scheduled destruction.) Destined to become a playhouse, it will be the last rehabilitation project at Lee Hall.
That is, if nobody tries to reclaim one of the buildings. "If somebody wants it back when I'm done, they can have it," Mr. Ohrstrom said, peering inside a circa-1830 one-room kitchen that will become his home office. It sounds crazy, but Mr. Ohrstrom insisted that it was true. He can absorb the loss: his mother was an oil heiress from Texas, and his father was an investor. But, he added, "I'd rather lose a building to someone who thinks it should return to its original site" than lose money on something like horse breeding.
Lilla Ohrstrom flashed a tolerant grin. "Chris has turned this place into the S.P.C.A. of abandoned buildings," she said. She has accepted his passion for restoring old buildings since meeting him 17 years ago at a ball in Newport, R.I. ("I was hunting for debs and got a keeper," he said.)
Take note: The buildings at the Ohrstrom spread are not name-brand architectural triumphs. Rather, they are vernacular survivors of a kind that can be encountered across the United States, from outhouses rendered useless by modern plumbing to farmhouses so rotted that no insurance company will touch them. But saving one can be prohibitively expensive. Mr. Ohrstrom's barn, which combines old-fashioned post-and-beam construction with more modern balloon-frame technology, cost a bargain price of $2,000. Restoring it, however, cost $100,000, a sum that included conservation materials like an Abatron epoxy that helps solidify deteriorated wood.
"The point is to use as little new material as possible," said Doug Vickers, a master carpenter and house dismantler in Ancaster, Ontario. He has helped Mr. Ohrstrom salvage numerous buildings over the years, including a Federal house that now stands at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. "You don't want to put all that struggle and effort into a building unless you're going to be authentic," Mr. Vickers said.
At the main residence in the compound, an L-shaped, 5,400-square-foot house moved from Mecklenburg County, Va., called Lee Hall, history doesn't just live, it crackles, thanks in part to Mr. Ohrstrom's spirited décor. The dining room's woodwork is painted eye-popping Prussian blue, a color that was all the rage in the early 19th century. Across the hall in the living room, two dozen exotic 1790's views of the Orient by Thomas and William Daniell are glued onto the walls in the manner of a Georgian print room. (Stay calm: they are digital reproductions.)
Floors are covered with boldly patterned ingrain carpeting, the wall-to-wall of the 1800's, and archaic push-button light switches give the impression that Lee Hall was last rewired around 1900. It's an artifice that conforms to Mr. Ohrstrom's belief that alterations to an old house should follow what he called "a plausible chronology."
He and Alexandra di Valmarana, a historic buildings conservator, also made the new stacked back porches look like 1910 Colonial Revival additions.
Initially, Mr. Ohrstrom wanted a Mount Vernon-style piazza, but Mr. Vickers balked, telling him, "If you build that, I don't want anything to do with this place. You'll ruin it." (Ms. di Valmarana saved the day with an alternative design.) Mr. Vickers even had some reservations about the décor. "The colors were outlandish and the carpets absolutely gaudy," he said last week by telephone from his home in Canada. "But I was really surprised how wonderful it looked when it all came together."
Respect for old-fashioned décor aside, Mr. Ohrstrom is no Luddite. (His children would not mind if he proved it by buying the family a television set.) The antique buildings serve modern purposes. The air-conditioning system is tucked inside the 1840's dairy, and a freezer resides in an 1835 smokehouse. Still, "The kids say it's like living in a museum," Mr. Ohrstrom said.
His son Elias, 14, responded with an exaggerated eye roll and said, "That's because it is a museum" before heading down an arsenic-green staircase to the sunny raised basement. There Elias, his sister Delilah, 12, and younger brother, Finley, 7, live in an environment more to their liking. (The baby of the family, Georgina, 15 months, has a bedroom upstairs.) Anchoring Elias's room, for example, is a mirrored platform bed he designed himself. "This is what happens when you don't have television," Mr. Ohrstrom said, just slightly defensively. "If the kids think of it, they can do it."
Later, he went outside to work on a project of his own: painting a 19th-century window with a historically correct reproduction sash brush and hand-mixed white paint. "I don't like modern life very much," he conceded. "Excellence is out of fashion, and convenience is king."
The children may not entirely appreciate what their father has wrought, but in historic decorative-arts circles, Mr. Ohrstrom is a star. He lectures across the country on early wallcoverings, a passion sparked the day he pried up a molding in upstate New York and found a fragment of an important 19th-century French scenic paper called Cupid and Psyche. (He and a business partner, Steve Larson, own Adelphi Paper Hangings, based in The Plains. It makes meticulous hand-blocked reproductions of more than 40 wallpapers and 17 borders good enough for Colonial Williamsburg and the Smithsonian to hang in some of their period rooms. Prices start at $325 for an 11-yard roll; information www.adelphipaperhangings.com or 540-253-5367.)
The curators of Monticello hired Mr. Ohrstrom and Mr. Larson to repaint its famous dome room, a coup they described as akin to winning the Super Bowl. And in recent years, Mr. Ohrstrom has begun restoring buildings in Falmouth, Jamaica, a depressed port with a collection of 18th- and 19th-century British Colonial architecture. "We've saved 18 buildings so far," he said. He envisions a renewed Falmouth as a place that could support restaurants, hotels and a slavery museum.
Not every business venture has been an unalloyed success. His line of 18th-century-style linseed oil paint bombed. "I was dead wrong about that one," he said cheerfully. "It was not a mass-market product."
Historic preservation is not necessarily the career path his parents would have chosen for him. After a hard-drinking period at the University of Virginia, which he laughingly called "very Dylan Thomas," he spent 18 dispiriting months in Strasbourg, France, working for an electronics business owned by his family. "I hated every minute of it," Mr. Ohrstrom said.
Perhaps because he had already spent his formative years in a sort of Brideshead of architecture and design. After his parents divorced, his mother married the Second Viscount Rothermere, a British newspaper magnate who owned The Daily Mail. For him, the downside of moving to England at the age of 10 was the class-consciousness. "It was bad enough that I was American, but it was considered far worse that my mother was Texan," he said.
The upside was Daylesford, his stepfather's 18th-century Anglo-Indian house in Gloucestershire, decorated in the late 1950's and early 60's by the London designer John Fowler, an inspired historicist.
Eight years ago, Mr. Ohrstrom's father died, spurring his decision to build a home in Virginia on land he inherited. Its centerpiece would be Lee Hall, an 1818 house that had been abandoned since the 1940's. Every window was smashed, the columned portico had collapsed into a heap, and thick woods hid it from view in Mecklenburg County in southwest Virginia, about 150 miles from The Plains.
"I lived an eighth of a mile away but never knew it was there," said Randy Snowten, 37. But Mr. Snowten was looking for extra money, and when he heard that Mr. Vickers and Mr. Ohrstrom were dismantling the house, he and his brothers came to help. Then Mr. Snowten came here and spent months chipping old mortar from thousands of chimney bricks. Today, he is Mr. Ohrstrom's farm manager and lives on the property with his wife, Portia, and their four boys.
"I wish restoration was chic, like Buddhism," Mr. Ohrstrom said. "It really should be a movement, with a Dalai Lama to get people interested."
Mr. Ohrstrom might just be that man. Seeing the home he has assembled on this once-barren hilltop, friends have urged him to find orphan buildings for them too. As for Mr. Snowten, he knows what he is going to do when he retires. "I will not build a new house," he said. "I'm going to go in the woods and find me an old one and fix it up."
